OK, so we've moved into the next (and I guess final) phase of our project, and I'm groping in the dark. For the real questions whose answers we have to grade, we have guides to how they are scored. For this new phase, we do not; we are the ones who set the guidelines, and therefore we are the ones who say this gets full credit and that gets no credit. But it's hard. Not only do we not have any markers from which to draw the parameters, we have new standards radically different from what we're used to. We are making our own scoring decisions. Sure, in the long run it doesn't matter because it's the teachers who will have the final say. But that isn't an excuse for what we have to do over the next couple days.
Add to that I'm still very new to this, and Monday afternoon was a struggle. I was reading paper after paper thinking, "Should this be a 4? I think it's a 4, but what if I'm wrong?" I tried putting all the answers I printed out in some kind of order, but now that I think about it, they're probably all wrong and I'll have to go change them when I come into work in the morning. Beyond that, I have to set up examples and sets and rules, and I have to know what I'm going to say to my team. And then I'll have to do that for three more questions, two of which need to be done by Tuesday end of day.
It got so muddied that, after I kept looking and looking at the same response, pacing back-and-forth across our now-empty room, I emphatically rapped at the printout of this response, momentarily forgetting that I was talking to myself while other people were around, looking at me. Just then I turned my head and locked eyes with one of them, who said, "That's not helping."
Whoops. That sucked me back into reality, and I quickly stammered out a, "Sorry." But now that I've had time to think about it, I should not have apologized in a situation where I too often do just that. What's not helping? Me trying to figure out what score to give this response? That's how I sort things out, by acting out. Oh, do you mean it's not helping your concentration? At one point in the afternoon she put earplugs on. This normally gregarious woman all of a sudden decided she wanted peace and quiet, and I did not have the mental telepathy to know this until I distracted her. My fault.
You know, she probably is the lieutenant of the room, but she can also be the problem child. Usually she's fine -- gregarious, nice, fair, and totally can communicate the rules of the scoring. But sometimes she gets all ... well, for lack of a better word, uptight. Last week she got into a fight with another of our co-workers, who've fought before. They act like brother and sister; they're now all chummy. But it's the about-face that I still don't get. She was just fine last week, and she was, well, aloof but not bitchy Monday morning. But now that she has to focus on something while I react to doing the same thing with some demonstration, she doesn't like it.
Well, I don't like her, at least her when she's acting that way. I will not bend how I act, especially if I don't know how to do something, in order to allow her to concentrate. I don't know how she'll act in the morning, nor how she'll react with me. But I know this will happen again, and I'll have to deal with her attitude.
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